Klaus reappeared, holding a half-full glass of a violet beverage he identified as Purple Rain—“a reminiscence to Prince,” he explained—procured from the campus smoothie bar. As he escorted me Nike Air Max 1 Womens back through Laces, we passed a loft-like Maker-Lab, modeled after a hackerspace and stocked with bolts of textiles, bins of materials, and an array of machines for sewing, woodworking, and 3-D printing. In an atrium, employees congregated near full-size, living trees; they tapped at their laptops by an amphitheater, where TED-style talks are held regularly during Adidas Superstar Damen lunchtime. The whole scene felt like a startup staffed by athletes.At a time when the world’s most highly valued and influential companies hail from the West Coast, there is a powerful narrative in the business world that all companies should become tech companies or else risk obsolescence. As the adage goes: innovate or die. Members of the Future team spoke frequently and enthusiastically about their “open source approach” to research and development. When, in October, the AM4 series was announced, a video spliced footage of runners with footage from the Speedfactory, with a voice-over that mimicked the sound of an astronaut urgently transmitting over a weak radio link from Adidas ZX Flux Mujer the moon: “Athlete data-driven design,” the voice said, mysteriously. “Open source cocreation. Man and machine.” It sounded a bit like an algorithmically Nike Roshe Run Womens generated Silicon Valley word cloud. “Production line of innovations,” it continued. “Accelerated crafting from months to hours. Optimized for athletes.”

This isn’t the first time Adidas has emphasized technology in its products and their branding. In 1984 the company Nike Air Odyssey Femme put out a shoe called Micropacer that held a small computer to calculate distance, pace, and calories. That same year it rolled out the Fire, a sneaker with removable foam inserts of varying densities. In recent years, Adidas has introduced a number of high tech, exclusive sneakers, including the Futurecraft 4D, which boast a 3-D-printed sole “crafted with light and oxygen.” Lately, Adidas has worked with more sustainable materials and recently released a number of products made with “Parley Ocean Plastic”: a recycled plastic collected in the Maldives by a nonprofit Nike Air Max 2016 Femme organization.But perhaps more than the tangible qualities of products themselves, Adidas is altering the long-running scripts for the ways consumers build a narrative around fashion. With sneaker manufacturing so tied to sweatshops in Asia, companies like Adidas Adidas Superstar Homme and Nike have long downplayed the origin stories of their products. But with the push toward sustainability, robotics, and personalized goods, Adidas is encouraging consumers not only to consider where their shoes come from but also to pay a premium for the origin story. Boost midsoles are already being produced in more traditional factories, such as those in China, and at a much higher volume. They don’t need to be made in a Speedfactory. Producing components that are usually made elsewhere in a high tech manufacturing environment struck me as less of a way to optimize a supply chain than a conceit—a story to be www.mesryne.fr told. Tech, or at least its aesthetic, has a halo effect.

WHEN THE ATLANTA Speedfactory opens at the end of this year, it will bring about 160 new jobs. The party line is that Speedfactory’s robots will not replace Nike Air Huarache D&#225;msk&#233; humans but instead provide job opportunities for “upskilled” factory workers. Job listings include roles for quality inspectors, tailors, process engineers with robotics experience, and technicians with fluency in machining. The Speedfactories will produce about half a million pairs of shoes—just a sliver of Adidas’ total annual output, which runs close to 300 million. The Speedfactory sneakers, at least in the short term, are likely to be sold to a niche audience that’s willing to pay upward of $260 for a limited-edition pair of shoes.Some economists are bullish on ideas Adidas NMD Femme like Speedfactory and see it as the start of a much larger trend. “We are finally escaping from Nike Air Huarache Womens the manufacturing trap that we’ve been in for the last 20 years,” says Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, DC, Adidas Superstar Femme referring to the mass offshoring of production to Asia. Improvements in automation can now finally substitute for cheap foreign labor, which will naturally push factories closer to where the consumers are. As manufacturing shifts from offshore mass production to customized, local fabrication, new jobs will open up for human workers, some of which have yet to reveal themselves. “We used to have distribution built around manufacturing,” Mandel says, referencing the centrality of offshore factories, “and now I think that manufacturing is going to be built around distribution.”